The Comic's Heartbeat: Framing Affective Structures in Comics History by
Samuel Fate Strong
A thesis presented to OCAD University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, April, 2015 Sam Strong 2015
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The Comic's Heartbeat: Framing Affective Structures in Comics History Master of Arts 2015
Samuel Fate Strong
Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories OCAD University
Abstract
This thesis proposed a structure-centered method for composing a critical history of comics. It examined the development building and breaking template--a rigid grid of panels depicting a narrative arc, which then leads to a panel depicting the arc's climax that breaks with that established structure--through four moments in the history of English-language comics. Rather than attempting a
comprehensive overview of the building and breaking template, the thesis was a proof of concept for the application of recent advances in structure-oriented comics theory and in theories of affect--the pre-cognitive experience of emotion--to specific comic structures. Examining the work of Bernard Krigstein, Art Spiegelman, David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik, and Joshua Cotter, the thesis placed these artists within a context of conditionality, dependent both upon the material circumstances of comics production and upon the unique semiotic and affective experiences of the comic's readers.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the aid of many individuals and institutions. My research and study at OCAD University was sponsored in part by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship from the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities, and a Presidential Scholarship from OCAD University. My research into the early history of comics would have been far more difficult without the help of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, and its dedicated staff. The project's final form owes much to my primary adviser, Doctor Keith Bresnahan, who first suggested Affect Theory as a possible methodology for approaching the problem of the building and breaking template. Additionally, I would like to thank my secondary adviser, Doctor Sarah McLean-Knapp, for her critiques of the argument presented here, without which the final document would be no doubt significantly weaker. I wish to thank Doctor Michael Prokopow for first encouraging me to carry out my research at OCAD, and Doctor Andrea Fatona for her guidance as head of the CADN program. And finally, I could not have gotten this far without the encouragement and support from my parents, Dennis and Joan Strong. Thank you.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. The Building and Breaking Template—A Descriptive Field 14
3. Krigstein and the Disciplining of the Artist 56
4. Alternative Comics and the Plurality of Forms 69
5. City of Glass and the Template's Uses 76
6. Driven by Lemons and Affective Difficulty 91
List of Figures
Figure 1.1 Building and Breaking 110
Figure 1.2 Strip 110
Figure 1.3 The Metaframe 110
Figure 1.4 Initiator, Prolonger, and Peak panels 110 Figure 2.1 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, issue 11, 27-28. 111 Figure 2.2 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, issue 12, 6 111 Figure 2.3 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, issue 11, 27-28, Elements 112 Figure 3.1 Harvey Kurtzman, “Henry and His... Goon Child,” in Weird
Fantasy 3, 1950 113
Figure 3.2 Bernard Krigstein, “More Blessed to Give,” 34-40 114-115 Figure 4.1 Art Spiegelman, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” 116 Figure 5.1 Paul Karasik. “Sketches for City of Glass” 117 Figure 5.2 Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, City of Glass 118 Figure 5.3 Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, City of Glass 119
Chapter 1: Introduction
The field of English-language comics theory has grown considerably in the last three years, with a veritable explosion of new texts exploring the way the medium works, as well as an increased interest in translating major theorists from the Franco-Belgian comics theory tradition into English. This growth of the critical side of scholarship has made it possible to consider new ways of carrying out an analysis of individual comics within a historical context, but this merging of comics criticism with comics history has, for the most part, yet to happen. Thierry Groensteen, in Comics and Narration, the followup to his influential text The System of Comics, calls for the creation of a critical history of comics that moves beyond the best seller list and incorporates a greater understanding of the semiotic and formal development of comics.1 This thesis is one possible answer to
that call, a speculative model for how a critical history might be written. In structure it takes the theoretical work of a number of scholars both inside and outside the realms of comic theory and mobilizes their analytical strategies in the context of the history of comics as a medium. The centerpiece of this narrative is one formal structure within English-language comic books: an arrangement of panels that I am calling the “building and breaking” template. This structure represents a space for experiences both of the information comics convey—their semiotic content—and of the emotional content of comics—their affective
potential—and this thesis uses the building and breaking template to explore how
1 Thierry Groensteen, Comics and Narration, Translated by Ann Miller, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013) 1-4
these spaces are situated within a wider history of English-language comics. The building and breaking template is a regular grid of panels that depict some narrative arc or moment of action—the “building” of regularity paired with mounting narrative tension—and a panel or panels that deviates from that pattern at the climax of that arc—a “break” with that regularity. Figure 1.1 is prototypical of this template: it is an imagined two page spread where the left page represents “building” and the right represents “breaking”. The left page is composed of square panels arranged in a 3x4 “regular” composition2—a composition where the
panels are arranged in a grid that looks like a waffle iron.3 The right page is one
large panel, commonly called a “splash” panel; it dramatically breaks with the previously established pattern.
The narrative of this thesis follows the development of this structure specifically in English-language comic books, from the development of comic books as independent objects containing narratives that extended across multiple pages in the 1930s and 40s up to the comic books and graphic novels of the present day. I have limited the scope of this analysis so that the template can be analyzed as part of a discourse shared between comics creators that are part of a cultural tradition that encompasses production, reception, and an exchange of ideas. It also allows for a discussion of particular patterns of page creation and ways in which readers navigate the comic narrative in a specific format. This is not to say that the building and breaking template can only exist in
English-2 Term from Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics, Translated by Bart Beatty and Nick Nguyen, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009) 96.
language comic books, or only in longer narrative works as opposed to newspaper comics. Rather, it allows for a tight focus on the particular issues of production and development that in the world of English-language longer narrative comics affected how the structure appeared, and when.
The theoretical approaches used here also deserve some discussion. I am fusing together several different approaches that are to some extent antipathetic towards the idea of a historical analysis. As described above, there is currently an explosion of semiotically-informed, structurally focused explorations of comics, and the works of these scholars heavily informs the processes being used by critics to analyze individual comics. In some cases, these texts emphasize heavily the role of the reader in interpreting comics, which implicitly introduces elements of ambiguity in analysis.4 This invites speculative criticism that frustrates attempts
to locate “virtuoso” works.5 This is a term Groensteen uses to describe the kind of
works that a critical history would examine, and as such marks my departure from what Groensteen may have intended in this call. By implication “virtuoso” seems to imply a level of individual artistry that far surpasses the average. While much of the analysis here covers works that I personally find deeply engaging and impressive, the analysis is more interested in a wider social, linguistic, economic, and audience-oriented context, rather than attempting to locate and consecrate the masters of English-language comics. While the conditions of creation are
4 Barbara Postema, Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, (Rochester: RIT Press, 2013)
5 Groensteen, Thierry, Comics and Narration. 151. Ironically, perhaps, Groesteen himself engages in a varied reading of comics of the exact type I suggest disrupts concrete claims of virtuosity.
important to this analysis, the varied experiences of an audience to comics are equally important.
This analysis has been fused to affect theory, a developing field that examines the pre-cognitive experience of emotion in art and society—a field that has yet to be adopted broadly into comics theory discourse. I am adopting it because the building and breaking template is not merely a tool for
communicating information to the reader but a way of communicating or enabling an emotional and even visceral, embodied response to a comic's narrative. When scholars discuss comics as having rhythmic qualities,6 or speak of rising tension
and anticipation or dread, they are in the realm of affect, and this aspect of comics demands the level of development and theoretical support that Scott McCloud's largely structuralist approach to comics has received in the two decades since its publication.7
Jenifer Robinson, in an overview of affect theory entitled Deeper than Reason, argues that affect allows readers to understand and draw conclusions about a text, functioning as a way of reasoning through a text's content.8 If a key
aspect of the building and breaking template is to incite or invite particular emotional responses, it seems imperative to examine the ways in which those emotional responses lead to certain conclusions about the meaning of a text. It is important, too, to consider the ways in which varied, even resistant responses to the text might be productive. The building and breaking template acts as a kind of
6 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 45-4
7 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) 8 Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 154-56.
grammatical script for how comics may be composed, and this grammatical construction can be stored and recalled by a reader. The nature of the building and breaking template as a shared grammar that comic creators may draw upon for communicative ends (both semiotic and affective) enables the structure's use by creators and readers as a site of various mobilizations and acts of resistance or deviation from expectations. 9A core part of the criticality of this history, then, is
recognizing how this grammatical and affective quality reinforces the historically predicated nature of virtuosity by emphasizing the contingency of the actual readers' experiences.
As a grammatical construct, the building and breaking template is not an absolute rule. A wide range of variations appear in comics that share major features with one another without strictly adhering to a definition. For this reason, I will now expand my initial description of the template into a looser and more complex diagnostic criteria for identifying the building and breaking template.
Definitions
Before expanding on the qualities of the building and breaking template, it is worth reviewing several key terms that will be used in the definition,
particularly since a number of them come from very recent comics scholarship. Previously I referred to “panels” when talking about the overall composition of comics pages, but in the rest of this thesis I will be following a distinction that Thierry Groensteen draws between frames and panels.10 Following Groensteen, I
9 Groensteen, Comics and Narration. 151. 10 Groensteen, The System of Comics
will be using the term “frame” to refer to the box that surrounds and contains the artwork—the “panel.”11 Making this distinction means that comics can be
described as functioning in different ways depending on whether the frame or the panel contents drive the composition. A page layout designed to accommodate the contents of the panels, the frames changing shape to fit the objects within them, can be described as a “rhetorical” design. In contrast, “non-rhetorical” designs privilege the design of the frames over the panel contents, editing or truncating those panel contents in order to maintain the predetermined frame structure.12
This term division is one tool for discussing the design of pages regardless of their contents. Groensteen provides several other terms for describing the placement of frames in a comic. A series of frames arranged in a row, like the highlighted frames in Figure 1.2, can be called a “strip.”13 The two other major
terms Groensteen uses to describe frames are the multiframe and hyperframe. The multiframe is the collection of all the frames within an entire comic. This term is useful when referring to sequences in comics that stretch across multiple pages, and can be used to describe a frame's, or a panel's, placement within a whole comic.14 Similarly, the hyperframe, which describes the larger implied or
imagined frame that surrounds all the frames on a single page, can be used to
11 Groensteen's distinction is somewhat more complex, and Barbara Postema devotes an entire chapter of Narrative Structure in Comics to the nature of the frame and gutter which can be referred to for greater clarification, but this more crass definition is enough to carry the theoretical work here without overly complicating matters.
12 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 93. Groensteen draws on Benoit Peeters in using these terms; I have simplified his four terms (“conventional,” “decorative,” “rhetorical,” and “productive”) for the sake of broader focus without confusion. See also, Groensteen, Comics and Narration. 46
13 Ibid. 21 14 Ibid. 28
discuss how a particular panel can be placed, say, first or last in the hyperframe.15
In figure 1.3, the hyperframe of each page has been marked in red; the whole composition constitutes the sequence's multiframe.
There are several important terms that describe the panel contents, or, more specifically, that describe the way comics panels function in a narrative— their “visual narrative grammar.”16 This concept comes from the neuroscientist
and linguist Neil Cohn, who has done considerable research into the way visual elements within comics communicate ideas and narratives. Cohn classifies panels in a number of different ways based on their narrative function. The most
important of these for the purposes of this analysis are initiators—which mark the start of an action; peaks—which mark the dramatic conclusion of that action; and prolongers—which do not initiate or conclude an action but instead extend it. This can be seen in figure 1.4, which begins with an initiating panel (I), continues with a series of prolongation panels (L) and concludes with a peak (P!).17 These
panels can be somewhat imperfectly paralleled with the narrative discourse that Roland Barthes laid out in his semiotic system for the analysis of narratives.18
Peak panels in Cohn's schema are similar (though not identical) to Barthes's cardinal functions, which represent critical points in the narrative where the action determines the course of the story. In contrast, the panels that prolongue the action might be analogous to either catalyzing functions, which are minor actions that do not affect the course of the narrative, or even indexes, which do not further
15 Ibid. 30-31, 34
16 Neil Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) 4. 17 Ibid. 70-71.
the action of the plot, instead acting to increase the reader's understanding of that plot, the characters, the setting, and so on by providing supplemental
information.19
With these terms defined, we can consider the diagnostic criteria20 of the
building and breaking template more closely. Comics sequences that can be described as using building and breaking techniques often include the following:
1. A section of the hyperframe's design composed of a series of frames of equal size and shape
2. The arrangement of these frames into a “regular composition”—a rigid grid that looks like a waffle iron. This arrangement becomes an
established pattern for the sequence.
3. The introduction of an action or narrative arc that is initiated and then developed, usually with many prolonger panels that draw the action out 4. A non-rhetorical structure where panel contents are truncated or composed
in order to accommodate the predetermined regular grid structure 5. The introduction of a panel or series of panels that breaks with the
19 Ibid. 91-95
20 Using a fluidly defined field is useful for several reasons. Most notably, it mirrors a useful strategy for defining comics as a whole, borrowed from Thierry Groensteen, whose The System of Comics might be considered a book-length attempt to lay out a similar descriptive field for comics. Groensteen in fact only introduces a definition in the sequel to this text in order to begin considering the borders at which that definition breaks down. Defining comics as a cluster of related qualities that may or may not be present effectively cuts past the endless arguing over strict terminology that seems to be a feature of every major and minor work of comics scholarship since McCloud launched the argument with his own definition in 1993, or perhaps even dating back to Will Eisner's introduction of the notion of “sequential art.” It seems reasonable to use a similarly field-based explanation of Building and Breaking, as many of the examples considered would not fit comfortably within a unified definition without broadening it beyond usefulness, and yet are recognizable as serving fundamentally similar roles within the comics narrative.
established pattern of the sequence
6. The placement of a “peak” panel—the conclusion of the introduced action or arc—in this frame that breaks with the established pattern
There are, furthermore, several other qualities that commonly appear in these sequences but are of somewhat lesser importance:
7. An associated transition, as from one strip to the next in the hyperframe, the move to another adjacent hyperframe, or the active turning of a page 8. Repetition of panel contents or close compositional similarity in panel
contents
9. A reduction or absence of words over the course of the sequence resulting in many “silent” panels
These qualities work together to open up spaces for the reader to respond to the text in particular ways. In one sense this structure opens a semiotic space by providing information that a reader might use to understand the informational content of the story. The structure provides indices and catalyzers that do not move the narrative forward but provide greater information for the reader. As a script that can be stored in a reader's memory and potentially recalled, it also serves as an established sign for the reader to pay attention to particular panel contents.21 In many of the examples used in this thesis, the building and breaking
template, and the different models that preceded it throughout the development of English-language comic books, serve a rhetorical or at times symbolic function, with the regular structures and their disruption paralleling the narrative in
complex ways.
It also opens up an affective space, or a space where the reader might be emotionally affected and aroused by the narrative. Building and breaking sequences open up space for the reader to be affected, a space where the
experience and appraisal of emotion can take place, through various techniques. The reader might experience, for example, the building of excitement (or dread) if a reader recognizes the structure and anticipates a dramatic climax, the
proliferation of small details that a reader might react to in various ways, or the inducement of frustration as an awaited moment is delayed. While some authors analyze affect in literature (and other arts) from the perspective of a presumed intended reading, I wish to discuss affect in terms of spaces and potentials. In this I am following contemporary theorists such as Jennifer Doyle and Eve Sedgwick, who emphasize the way an affective response is based on affinities and conditions that can cause failures to connect or differences in interpretation. Therefore, rather than discussing individual comics in terms of emotions specifically invoked, this analysis will explore how this structure opens up particular spaces where readers can be affected.
Structure of the Thesis
The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part lays out the theoretical underpinnings of the thesis, which are then applied to a series of comics in the second. As the goal of the second part is to apply these theories in a practical way, the first section will use a sequence from the climax of Dave Gibbons and Alan
Moore's comic Watchmen as a test case. This comic represents a major use of the building and breaking template and can be used to examine the semiotic potential of the structure, the affective spaces opened up by the structure, and the way readers might respond in varied ways to the comic, all within the context of a wider history.
In the second section of the thesis, the first two chapters are concerned with the development of key components of the Building and Breaking structure. This overview consists of a series of examinations of individual artists,
predominantly focusing on those comic makers who explored structures related in form to the building and breaking template. The scope of this section is therefore not a comprehensive history of English-language comic books and graphic
novels, or even of this structure and all its precursors, but a limited examination of key moments in the structure's development that shed light on the ideas discussed above. Of the artists explored, individual works have been selected to serve as representatives of the general experiments being carried out in form by these artists. In this way I hope to sketch out a trajectory for this formal development without producing a mere catalog of its every instance.
The first chapter in this section examines the works of Bernard Krigstein, an artist active in the 1940s and '50s at a number of different studios, who rose to more recent scholarly notoriety in recent years in part due to Art Spiegelman's analysis of his work.22 I use Krigstein's work to explore the ways in which
prolonger and refiner panels open up particular affective space, while using his
own history within the medium is used to explore the material limitations that prevented him from exploring this potential further. In contrast to this artist and his contemporaries, the alternative comix creators of the 1960s and '70s had extensive artistic freedom in both form and content but did not, for the most part, experiment with building and breaking or its predecessor forms. Nevertheless, their work is often affectively charged. The second section of this chapter explores how the greater liberty of alternative comix creators prompted an
explosion of different formal strategies for exploring affective space through form as well as content, while simultaneously making it difficult for a shared semiotic vocabulary to emerge. In particular, this section will look at the early work of Art Spiegelman, the experimental artist who went on to produce the critically
acclaimed graphic record of his family's experience of the Holocaust, Maus. The last two chapters examine ways in which the transformation of the building and breaking template into a shared grammar makes possible
experiments with the form as well as moments of tension and resistance between texts and their readers. First, Mazzucchelli and Karasik's adaptation of the Paul Auster novel City of Glass represents a use of the building and breaking template radically different from that explored earlier in the thesis. In their work, the template contains symbolically charged and iconic, rather than literal, images, and the use of the structure becomes a way of carrying the novel's critique of language into the comics form, as the nature of the hyperframe itself is interrogated.
and breaking structure in order to introduce discontinuities and uncomfortably ambiguous experiences, experiences where the reader both does not know what to think, and also does not intuit what to feel. This experience of productive
resistance between text and reader, however, is tenuous and may lose its power to shock as a reader's expectations change.
This exploration reveals how grammatical structures may emerge within comics under particular conditions, with readers drawing various positive or negative experiences from their use. It reveals, too, that while the affective content of comics is both profoundly important to our understanding of the meaning and artistry of comics, it also eludes easy systemization. The building and breaking template may be mobilized by such diverse purposes that to associate it with any one affect is difficult if not impossible. Nevertheless, the analysis here reveals the potential for a critical history that could acknowledge the diverse applications of a structure and use the history of its development to reframe and reconsider the canon of comics as a whole.
Chapter 2: The Building and Breaking Template—A Descriptive Field
In the first part of this thesis I want to examine a short sequence from the climax of Dave Gibbons and Allan Moore's 1983 comic Watchmen as a way of explaining how I will be analyzing other individual sequences and works in the rest of this thesis.23 Watchmen is a comic that follows a group of (mostly) retired
superheroes who discover a vast and sinister conspiracy. In the background of the story, the United States and Russia teeter on the edge of nuclear war, and in each issue of the comic the infamous Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight. Ultimately the hapless heroes of the story discover that their onetime ally, Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias, has orchestrated events in order to launch an assault on New York City of seemingly extraterrestrial origins, believing that the perceived presence of a cosmic threat will unite the world and avert nuclear destruction.
The sequence analyzed in this chapter represents the culmination of the narrative's many plot threads, as a genetically created monster is teleported into New York City, releasing a psychic shock wave that will kill half the city. In this sequence (Figure 2.1), bystanders in New York City, several of whom have played a part in the narrative previously, react to the apocalyptic arrival of the creature.24
Most notably, a newspaper stand owner and the boy who throughout the comic has been reading a secondary comic at his stand embrace in the face of death despite their previous hostility.25
23 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, (New York: DC Comics, 1986)
24 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, issue 11, 26-28. The graphic novel reprint of Watchmen is only paginated according to the numbers in the original comic books, so those numbers have been used here.
It is notable that even this sequence, despite its seemingly prototypical nature, problematizes a strict definition of the building and breaking template somewhat, as the final panel, the white panel which takes up the bottom strip of the page and represents the peak moment as the psychic squid monster
materializes in the city might not be the true “breaking” moment in this sequence. It is possible to read the sequence as concluding, in truth, with the six full page splash panels that begin Chapter 12 (an example of which can be seen in Figure 2.2), which break not only the structure of the twelve small panels preceding this moment but the entire comic: they are the only full splash panels in the entire comic.26 These panels, which show the magnitude and grotesque, B-movie
madness of the monster's arrival in lurid detail, serve as both a dismantling of the structure that has come before and the imposition of a new structure that attempts to encompass the full horror of Ozymandias's plot. It is precisely because of this flexibility in form that I have employed a flexible diagnostic criteria in explaining this form rather than a strictly prescriptive definition.
Nevertheless, this sequence provides a useful entry point for exploring the way the building and breaking template and related structures will be analyzed in this thesis. First, it allows us to see how the frames of comics both act as semiotic elements in themselves and can, through page design, allow for information conveyance. This part explores how the work of theorists interested in structuralism can be converted into a practical methodology for analyzing individual comics sequences. Second, it allows us to see the way comics have an
affective content that invites or provokes emotion. The sequence reveals both the ways in which affect influences our understanding of a sequence and the ways in which responses might emerge in diverse ways for different readers. Finally, it sets the stage for the historical exploration that is to follow, due to its status as a work resulting from particular social and economic conditions within comics publishing, conditions which helped make the exploration here possible.
The Semiotics of Frames and Panels
The first idea critical to understanding the building and breaking template and this sequence from Watchmen is that comics frames function semiotically. This principle touches upon a longstanding debate within comics: whether or not comics as a whole can be considered a language. This thesis will not attempt to resolve or, in truth, engage with this question in any sustained way. There are a number of competing, convincing opinions that perhaps are not always arguing against one another so much as proposing different definitions of the word
“language.” Hannah Miodrag, for example, puts forth a convincing argument that the contents of panels cannot, themselves, constitute a language in the semiotic sense of indivisible communicative parts composed into a langue.27 Whereas Cohn posits that comics are an expression of a larger visual language, using language in an expanded sense meaning ordered, learnable ways of forming utterances.28 In order to sidestep this debate while making use of the insights of
these different views, I will simply describe comics as a semiotic system where
27 Hannah Miodrag, Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013) 8-10
elements and groups of elements within comics can act as signifiers, and as grammatical patterns that can be stored and recalled by readers.29
The primary insights relied upon for the semiotic and narratological portion of this analysis come from the work of French scholar Thierry Groensteen, whose works The System of Comics and Comics and Narration provide a more rigorously argued theoretical structure. In particular, this study adopts many of his terms in order to describe the particular qualities of the building-and-breaking structure. Some are easily listed, and have been
summarized in the introduction: his distinction of the “frame” from the contents of the “panel” are already readily apparent throughout the preceding pages, and terms like “multiframe”--the collection of all the various frames within a comic narrative's overall composition—or “the regular composition” and “waffle iron”--for the grid of panels that constitute the rhythmic breaking motion—follow logically from this terminology.
The major insight Groensteen provides is one about the way in which readers process images. Unlike McCloud's more linear, sequential model, which places meaning-generation in the gap between adjacent panels,30 Groensteen
posits that readers process comics through braiding, a nonlinear construction of meaning where multiple panels, not necessarily adjacent but potentially from across the comic, work in unison to make meaning.31 This process can be seen in
the way the exact nature of the building and breaking template system described
29 Compare Miodrag's use of the term “symbol system.” Comics and Language. 11. 30 McCloud, Understanding Comics, 66-74
earlier in this chapter shifts with the introduction of new panels. This model of panel reading (suggested by Groensteen and elaborated by Postema)
acknowledges that all of the panels of the “hyperframe”—the block of frames collected on the visible page—are immediately at hand for the reader.32 The reader
enters the sequence from Watchmen aware of the block of white at the bottom of the page, and (Ozymandias having just completed his villainous monologue)33 can
probably surmise what that block of white means for the characters. The building sequence here is thus entered with foreknowledge of the break to come.
The appearance of the six tolling splash panels forces a reconsideration of this information, however, as described previously: the moment of the break becomes a moment of surprise as the anticipated break is revealed to have been a dupe. The appearance of this more dramatic break forces a resignification of the previous panels. Rather than a simple forward trajectory, comics fold temporally back upon themselves.34 Similarly, they constantly draw the past forward, in this
case via association between nuclear blast silhouette graffiti seen throughout the comic (including in one of the six splash panels), the nigh-omnipotent character Doctor Manhattan's repeated brushes with annihilation, the character Night Owl's dream of a nuclear blast destroying the world while he and Silk Specter kiss, and the shot of the news stand man and the boy embracing, their silhouettes dissolving into light.35 Panels across the comic signify and resignify in this braid. The
32 Ibid., Postema, Narrative Structure in Comics, 69-76. see also Miodrag, Comics and Language, in the chapter “Comics as Network.”
33 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, issue 11, 18-27.
34 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 114, Miodrag, Comics and Language, 118-22
structure of narrative building and breaking itself depends in part upon the resignification of the building panels by the breaking panel.
Groensteen, drawing upon Benoit Peeters, provides another useful term in the consideration of the rhythms of the regular composition: “rhetorical”
compositions, compositions where the frames are arranged in service to the panel contents. He points out that this tailoring of frames specifically to the action portrayed means that “the beat inherent to the multiframe... is still operative, but no longer in the marked form of the cadence.”36 This is particularly useful to note
because it provides a way of distinguishing between breaks in rhythm that fit into the building and breaking template and breaks that are purely rhetorical. This is necessary for understanding works like Watchmen, which has a highly regularized grid of nine panels per page. This grid is only seldom broken in the way
considered above; more frequently it is broken to make space for characters, action, a more comprehensive shot of particular scenes, and so on. Many of Watchmen's more notable formal experiments revolve not around the building and breaking of structure but the first part of that function—ongoing rigid rhythms that are not broken at dramatic moments but seem to march on relentlessly toward midnight on the bloody clock of Armageddon.37 It is within this rigid structure
that the even more aggressively apparent structure of the further subdivided grid of Chapter 11 appears, only to be shattered by the full page spreads; the preceding pages do the work of establishing the frame as a created symbol system which
36 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 148 37 Ibid. 97
then allows the deviations of this passage to signify.38 Distinguishing between
rhetorical breaking and the building and breaking template allows us to better understand the full extent of the formal experiments Gibbons and Moore carry out.
Groensteen also notes that various frame locations on a page have
importance. He usefully points out that comics are typically navigated by the turn of the page and the consideration of two pages in opposition to one another.39 The
way this hides and reveals meaning has great impact upon the interpretation of the text, because in his nonlinear model the reader experiences what is immediately in front of them as a compositional hyperframe within the multiframe, a unified block of panels that operate together. This places greater importance on the convention that the building and breaking template mechanism proper begins with a fresh page, and concludes within the same hyperframe.
Important to the notion that this form is recognizable, however, is the question of whether or not the syntax of comics panels can be stored in the same way that the syntax of, for example, poetry can be. If this structure is, in fact, a structure that can be learned rather than one that emerges obviously from the toolkit of the comic creator, interpreted instantly by the reader, there must be some ability on the part of comic readers to anticipate certain moves, store them, and become more competent or knowledgeable readers over time.
While he does not study these structures in particular, or more generally
38 Miodrag, Comics and Language, 119-22 39 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 29
the possibility that frame structures can be stored grammatical objects, Neil Cohn's research over the last decade provides considerable evidence for these kind of learning processes within the reading of comics. From the perspective of learning, he and other authors have demonstrated that comic readers become more competent with experience, able to navigate complex pathways quickly and able to remember greater details of the narrative despite passing through it—and even brushing past certain panels!--at greater speed than inexperienced comic readers.40
This suggests that making sense of comics structures is not, in fact, an obvious process at all but is a learned skill, a suggestion corroborated by explorations of the early history of navigational strategies in comics.41
According to Cohn's work, particular structures within comics can be stored in the minds of the reader. He analyzes this storage procedure on a number of different levels, from emanata—the floating, nonliteral marks such as sweat droplets or a lightbulb over a character's head used to convey an emotional state— to the level of reading structure, as described above.42 This language-like quality
of comics suggests that it is possible for the building and breaking template structure to be stored and recalled. The most direct comparison Cohn provides involves the linking of particular narrative beats within panels to utterances such as “VERB-ing the TIME away,” which can be filled with a wide range of words while retaining this familiar form.
Interestingly, Cohn stops short of analyzing the retention of frame
40 Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics. 134
41 Joseph Witek, “The Arrow and the Grid,” in A Comics Studies Reader, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008) Example on 8.
structures themselves. In his analysis of daily gag strips, for example, he discusses the infamous Setup-Beat-Punchine construction, exploring the now rather stale joke-telling mechanism as a stored form.43 It would be productive, however, to
extend this analysis further to the frame structure absent of content. Seeing a series of three or four panels in a single strip signals forcefully, after years of repetition in newspaper comics, that the reader is interacting with a gag strip, and can expect a joke conclusion. It seems significant, certainly, that so many
webcomic artists, despite the infinite canvas open to them, default to the strip format, if they are following the daily gag format, or default (as McCloud bemoaned over a decade ago in Reinventing Comics) to a vertical page format totally unsuited for viewing on horizontal computer screens, adhering to a structure that actively works against them.44 This unwillingness to break with
tradition, outside of a few exceptional cases, suggests that the frame structures themselves and the dimensions of the hyperframe themselves can be stored as, at the very least, genre norms. It does not seem that much of a stretch to extend that knowledge, and Cohn's work, to frames themselves as a vehicle for narrative. In this way, analyzing frames as structures that can be abstracted out of the narrative content of comics allows us to better understand the functionality of that narrative within the abstracted structure of the multiframe.
Key to bridging the gap between these ideas is Cohn's suggestion that there are components within visual narrative that work as a system and which are
43 Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics. 61, Neil Von Flue, “Set-up, (beat), punchline,” 2004,
Hypercomics, http://www,hypercomics,net/work/setupbeat/
44 Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form, (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 220-21
obvious to readers when manipulated or removed. They center upon the contextualization, initiation, extension, conclusion, and aftermath of actions. A number of panels can be taken from the Watchmen sequence to form a simplified diagram displaying each of these narrative functions (figure 2.3)
Panel one is an Orienter, which provides the larger context for the action, in this case the city street where the squid monster is about to land. Two refines that by providing a detail from the scene. Three is an Establisher, which shows the various players and objects which will operate as the important features of the action portrayed—the newspaper man and the boy. Four is the initiator panel, showing the start of an action—the two characters moving to embrace. Five prolongs the action started in Four, adding an extra beat before the whiteout panel, the peak panel. And finally panel Seven, the release, shows the aftermath of the arrival of the monster.45
For the purposes of this exploration, the most important components to be aware of are the ones noted in the description of building and breaking in the introduction. The building side frequently uses “prolongating” panels, which extend a motion through adding extra frames in the cinematic scenes, and “refining” panels, which clarify the setting or motion in some way. The panels taken out of the Watchmen sequence to form the simplified version are for the most part refiners or prolongaters. These panel functions might be usefully compared to the indexical signs in Barthes's semiotic model of narratives. Indices, Barthes says, are particularly semiotically based in that they provide information
that does not further the action of the plot but rather the reader's understanding of that plot, the characters, the setting, and so on.46 This certainly describes the
“refining” panels and arguably fits “prolongating” planes quite well, as in Cohn's conception they extend an action, rather than introducing new actions. The “peaks,” and occasionally “releases,” on the other hand, apply to the breaking moments, closing out the action at its highest point or elaborating on the aftermath. The peaks correspond to Barthes's “functions,” and specifically to “cardinal functions,” as they close off and complete an action of some import and tension (though we will see that they can be replaced, to baffling effect, with mere catalyzing functions).47
This means that the action in the building and breaking template structures is deferred, often paused or even arrested completely, until the moment of climax. These structures seem to function more like psychological novels, in Barthes's descriptions, than the fairy tales he puts in opposition to them, in that they flood the reader with information about what is happening without very much getting done. These moments can seem to slow down time as the reader passes through redundant panels that provide largely the same information, while simultaneously seeming to flash that information in a strobe fashion in cases where (as in
Watchmen) those panels have been reduced. Groensteen points out that the
46 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 94-95
47 Noting the similarities to Barthes is useful in that it provides another approach to
understanding these moments that is centered on narrative and how that narrative is conveyed, but a full exploration of the way this approach maps onto the visual storytelling of comics is complex and outside the scope of this thesis. It should be noted, though, that it is likely that there are indices present in even peak comics panels: the backgrounds, most obviously, provide information that is not part of the primary action.
introduction of a frame around an element draws the attention of the reader to that element, and the proliferation of frames in such sequences can incite a
hyperawareness from the reader, where each slight transition or object becomes charged with significance. 48And what do they signify? Simply that the climax is
coming but has not yet been reached. If a movement is expected to have a conclusion at its “peak,” or an action that gives rise to narrative instability must have a mirror action if it is not to become, in retrospect, an index of indecision, the reader might approach these indexical or catalyzing panels as hurdles that stand in the way of the expected closing parenthesis.49
One of the difficulties that readily becomes apparent when working with Cohn's system is the almost fractal complexity it introduces into the analysis of comics. Information that is parsed quite rapidly by the reader maps out in ever more complex nested frame and hyperframe relationships, and in sequences where multiple scenes with multiple temporalities and action arcs collide, it becomes nearly impossible to consider all the relationships simultaneously, ironically because of the same working memory cap that Cohn himself cites (perhaps erroneously) as a limitation of Groensteen's model!50 They face,
additionally, the same problem of ambiguity that McCloud's models of panel transitions and panel choice types suffers from, with numerous corner cases quickly presenting themselves. It is not entirely clear, for example, how a simple scene of dialogue can be categorized, frame by frame, in this schema as Cohn's
48 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 54
49 Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics. 112-19, Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 97 50 Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics. 67-68
examples are both entirely silent and entirely physical movement based. Furthermore, it is difficult at times to make a determination between where an “action” begins for the sake of classification as an Establisher, Initial, or Prolongation panel.
Nevertheless, it is worth attempting a full explication of the Watchmen sequence in order to both elucidate the difficulties of this analysis and explore the great potential it has for providing a window into the interaction of narrative and frame. It is from this methodology, after all, that several of the components of the field of building and breaking stem—specifically, the preponderance of catalyzing functions in the building sections and the placement of a cardinal function as the breaking moment.
First we will consider each panel individually. This is not too difficult in this sequence, as there are not too many arcs overlaid atop each other (though we will see momentarily that there are overlaps). The sequence begins with an Orienter panel, a wide shot taking up three of the regular columns displaying the full street. This is obviously rhetorical—the frame shape is designed to provide room for the consideration of the full scene. This scene is then expanded upon in what I would describe as refiner panels, in a strip of six running across the top. Here we are in an emphatically nonrhetorical mode, suddenly, as the frame sizes crop the figures and break up the diegetic space of the comic. This fragmentation allows the six panels to draw closer and closer in on the characters until the shot of the paper stand owner and the comic reading boy is a dramatic, head-on close
up. Notably, these panels do show a development in time signified by the increasingly blue and white palette as the light of the arriving psychic squid monster increases. Despite the role of these panels predominantly as refiners for the overall scene, there are still the beginnings of action depicted, which
highlights how the braided nature of comics results in a slippery interaction with Cohn's seemingly straightforward categories, with panels potentially taking on multiple roles simultaneously.
The third strip shows a single motion, which corresponds fairly easily to Cohn's structure. We see an establishing panel which provides us with the position of the man and boy, and then the action plays out, as the boy turns and tries to run away from the light and the man moves around him, shielding him with his body. The action is completed in the peak panel that ends the strip, as noted before, and the white panel at the bottom, the break moment, shows the resolution of the arc, the release. Thus we have four strips, two of which serve to build the rhythmic structure by the introduction of numerous indexical panels (refiners and
prolongers) and the final strip which is a single panel showing the resolution of the whole sequence, breaking the structure in the process in order to emphasize the conclusive, all-encompassing nature of that finish.
This reading is complicated, however, by the fact that this seeming conclusion is followed, in the next issue, by a sequence of six full page splash panels. This is the only time in the book where full page splashes are used, meaning that they break not only the rhythmic structure set up immediately before
them but the basic structure used throughout the narrative. The appearance of these panels prompts a re-signification. Their contents, the full destructive force and aftermath of the arrival of the giant psychic squid monster, suggests that perhaps the true overarching action is not the behavior of the people caught in the blast, but the arc of the city's destruction.
It is helpful, in this reading, to take the panels we have considered
separately and group them into strips. The first strip, under this model, represents the establisher. The full second strip, taken together, can serve, as I pointed out earlier, as the beginnings of an action, the initiator of the teleportation. Strips three and four, then, combine, as a single action, into one big prolonger block, a clustered action that as a whole draws out the action of the weapon's arrival. And finally, the six tolling splash panels serve collectively as the break moment, the peak of the arc–though they, too, could be considered individually, as a peak, four refiners, and then a final release panel which connects the aftermath of the major arc with the minor arc of the man and boy, whose bodies appear in the center of the page beneath the face of the titanic monster.
It would be possible here to go to an even more generalized view of the narrative. The entire sequence, taken as a whole, might be considered a sequence-level peak to a number of actions initiated throughout the chapter, and in fact the chapter as a whole might be considered a peak in the overarching twelve-chapter narrative. I mention this primarily to emphasize that any attempt to isolate a sequence is ultimately futile, as any sequence interrelates to the other pieces
within the comic in complex ways.
From this we can draw several conclusions about Cohn's methodology and its use in considering specific structures. First, applying these methodologies is inherently fraught because of the panel interrelationship that Groensteen points out. It does, as noted earlier, overwhelm the human working memory because of the way in which sequences intersect, overlap, and work as pieces of larger narrative sequences. This is true, of course, of Barthes's methodologies as well: the full map of a novel would be many times as long as the novel itself if it were to take account of the way chains of functions and indices combine to form larger rhetorical functions and indices.
Any application of this system must account for the choices readers make in navigating comics. Here, it is useful to refer to Barbara Postema's work, which emphasizes the way in which the gaps of the comics frame mirror larger gaps in the narrative which readers must close.51 Postema extends the work of Groensteen
in the direction of this sort of audience-centered critical methodology, and in doing so highlights the fact that these systems do not exist in the abstract but represent various navigational tools used to make sense of the various
juxtapositions within comics. I would add to her useful analogy an additional notion drawing from Cohn's work on panel navigation: just as readers must close the gap between panels, and navigate the hyperframe on the page in front of them, so must they navigate the countless interrelationships and nested narrative arcs that constitute the rhetoric of comics while closing the gaps of narrative.
Similarly, we can see that there is a readerly dimension in the
determination of where the break, in truth, comes. Depending on the way the sequence is read, it might come at the end of the final page of Chapter 11, or in the six page sequence that begins Chapter 12. If this is a structure that comics readers can store and recognize, they might recognize this in either way, interpreting the final page as a the building and breaking template structure fulfilled or as one where the break has been deferred. Neither reading seems to me to be particularly “correct.” For this reason, the mapping of the building and breaking template structure (or any frame structure, for that matter) onto a specific comic becomes another instance of gap-closing of the type that interests Postema.
The consideration of where the “peak” of this sequence comes is influenced, too, by the materiality of the comic, as we've discussed earlier with respect to Groensteen's notes on the narrative contents of frames in certain locations within the hyperframe.52 The turning of two pages to reveal the first
apocalyptic panel of Chapter 12 potentially prompts a re-signification of the final panel of Chapter 11, demoting it from a peak to another prolonger leading up to the true conclusion of the motion, represented by the arrival of the giant psychic squid monster. The interaction between reader, artist, comic, and stored structure, then, is characterized by indeterminacy, irresolution, and contingency as new information prompts resignification, while dangerously threatening to defuse the
structure by deviating too far from it.53 The application of the methodologies of
Cohn and Groensteen in unison make this contingency more apparent and might make more visible the “invisible” and largely unconscious processes that the reader makes use of to draw meaning from this structure.
Finally, it allows us to consider what is gained and lost by the introduction of this structure, which will be important later as the history of this structure's solidification is considered. From the standpoint of action, this is a highly costly structure, as its use of indices and catalyzers, its use of prolongers and refiners, eats up page room that in print media is inherently limited, while delaying the resolution of action. As we will see, this is not something that early superhero comics, in particular, were willing to accommodate. The tradeoff is that it
provides a strong pointer toward dramatic peaks within the narrative, highlighting important moments, and encourages a consideration of individual elements of an action or scene through the attention-drawing nature of the comics frame.
Affect
Inherent in discussions of the regular grid and its uses is the question of affect. Groensteen, for example, describes the regular layout as having particular rhythms to it, and notes that page layouts can be designed to achieve particular emotional ends.54 This is the realm of affect, the realm of sensation and the
visceral emotional response to the comics medium, conceived of frequently as occurring prior to the linguistic, semiotic function.
53 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 114
Affect and comics are linked together by a shared history of disdain and denial in critical theory. Jared Gardner, for example, places emotion (and thus, inherently, affective response) as of particular importance in the relegation of comics to the status of “gutter art.”55 Comics landed in the gutter, Gardner asserts,
alongside other serial works such as the early film serials and emotionally charged serial novels, each written off via different methods—the early film serials
abandoned as not properly “novelistic” unlike the constructions of the later studio system, and serial novels defined as maudlin and, importantly, gendered feminine, and summarily discarded. Comics, he points out, faced some of their greatest existential challenges as a medium at the very moment when the art and literary worlds turned resolutely away from emotion and affect, towards the dispassionate observations of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried in art and New Criticism in literature. It was not simply the content of comics that was so objectionable, but the potential for comics to “seduce the innocent,” as Frederic Wertham's famous book memorably put it, through its emotional qualities, and through the way in which the reader was invited to complete the narrative of the comic themselves. Unlike the literature the New Critics loved, “the comic... was necessarily intertextual and inevitably incomplete, requiring the reader to insert his [sic] feelings and interpretations actively into the text itself.”56
Bart Beaty, too, notes the antagonistic relationship between the art world and comics, via the reception of pop art in general, and Roy Lichtenstein's traced
55 Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of 21st Century Storytelling, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). The chapter “Serial Histories” is particularly instructive for this narrative.
comics panels in particular. Beaty notes that Lichtenstein's work was dismissed due to its association with the popular form and its affective content—its
aggressive reliance upon affect, in fact, as with the famous traced romance comic images which he reproduced at giant scale.57 The critics of the day were quite
open in their dismissal of this medium with which they had no familiarity and which they treated as an undifferentiated lump. Hovering beneath the surface of much of this dismissal is the understanding that the emotional content of comics made it unsuitable for true artistic consideration.
It is perhaps understandable, then, that in the attempt to elevate comics out of the gutter, many scholars have relied upon semiotics or formalism—theories largely devoid of affective charge. Nevertheless, as theories of affect slowly emerge within broader media discourse, completing the work of poststructuralism in dismantling the aloof observer of midcentury criticism, it seems worthwhile to address the tendency toward affective readings of comics explicitly, and to draw out, in a more formally rigorous way, the workings of affect within comics.
Affect, as it is increasingly used in contemporary theory and philosophy, is not simply emotion but rather encompasses a more complex understanding of visceral and embodied reactions that exists in a sense prior to the cognitive processing of emotion.58 Affect has, in fact, been frequently placed in opposition
to a semiotic or linguistic model of textual and cultural analysis, challenging what Brian Massumi describes as a totalizing, anthropocentric conception of all reality
57 Beaty, Comics Versus Art. 64.
resulting purely from the workings of the human mind and its linguistic faculty.59
Massumi's work, in fact, is particularly useful at this stage firstly because he describes fairly clearly the way in which language—or, we might say more broadly in keeping with Miodrag, symbol systems—interact with affect,
mediating what is initially unmediated, and secondly because his notion of affect depends in part upon points of rupture, key moments of indecision, that play into the reading-order games discussed earlier.60 Alongside Massumi, I will be making
use of Jenifer Robinson's recent comprehensive overview of affect as both a school of psychological science and school of criticism, which provides a strong generalized foundation from which to build a comics-specific approach toward affect.
Affect, in Massumi's work, is intensity, undifferentiated and indivisible. It is a visceral bodily response preceding culture and language, unmediated by the qualities that interest the structuralists and poststructuralists. Affect, for Massumi, is less a matter of feeling a particular thing, than it is a matter of differentiating and/or suppressing the flood of affect.61 Robinson's theory of affect, drawing from
a tradition developed first by the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and adapted in philosophy by writers like Eve Sedgwick62 and in psychology by theorists like
Paul Ekman (who Scott McCloud uses to build his theory of expressions in Making Comics)63, places similar emphasis on the precognitive nature of affect. 59 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 99-100
60 Ibid. 86, 102-04 61 Ibid. 86-87
62 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)
For Robinson and the Tomkins tradition, though, these initial embodied responses can be divided into several prime affects (the number of these primordial emotion types vary) which are then, as in Massumi's model, cognitively processed in various ways, interpreted, reframed, and mediated.64
This aspect of affect is important to understanding the process whereby readers interpret a text. Robinson particularly emphasizes the way that a reader's emotional experience of a narrative shapes that reader's understanding of the narrative's ideas by providing emotional weight to events and provoking
sympathies or antipathies between the reader and the characters.65 For Robinson,
it is not enough to dissect a text intellectually and arrive at conclusions through pure reason, because affect operates, as her title suggests, deeper than reason, and ultimately contributes to understanding in important ways. This means that to bridge the gap between the mere communicative qualities of comics and the second-order signification, the deeper level of meaning, affect is not only a useful but in fact a crucial tool. In Watchmen, for example, the central dilemma of the comic's conclusion—whether Ozymandias should be exposed and punished for his crimes at the risk of re-igniting an imminent nuclear war—is experienced as a dilemma in part because of those six semiotically excessive panels showing the destruction of New York.66 They do not increase the reader's understanding of
what has happened at the level of literal events so much as they increase the understanding of the magnitude of the crime, on a visceral and affective level.
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006) 82-86 64 Robinson, Deeper than Reason. 89-90 65 Ibid. 113-17
The specific interaction between the grammar of the multiframe and affect is worth exploring as well. Language, for Massumi, is primarily interesting for its limiting or supplementing function, dulling affect and reducing its power or working with it to enhance its power.67 Affect precedes language, but language
can act as a suppressing or multiplying force upon it, just as language might help to differentiate affect. While Massumi does not extend this notion beyond verbal language, and while I will be relying more closely on Robinson's understanding of affect as possibly emerging from an interaction with language, I want to suggest the possibility that Massumi's insights can be extended to other symbol systems as well, such as the multiframe in comics. The multiframe, in this understanding, would serve not simply as a way of indicating importance through its signification but would serve to amplify or reduce the affective content of the comics panel, the images mediated by the structure of the work itself, or the two working in concert to produce meaning. Additionally, it seems reasonable to suggest that the ability to store and recall the building and breaking template as a grammatical structure should allow it to be stored in memory as an affective structure as well: i.e. familiarity with the structure means that seeing something that looks like the structure might provoke a response based on the expectation of an experience like that which has come before.
Watchmen's affective qualities come from use of the building and breaking template both in ways that are inherent to the structure itself, and in ways that emerge from the reader's ability to store and recall the structure. For the moment I
will put aside the second usage and consider the structure in isolation here, as though there are no other instances of it, in order to examine the qualities of this sequence only in themselves (inasmuch as that is possible). As described earlier, the indexical and catalyzing panels of building sections draw focus and create a kind of semiotic overload, as details which would be considered en masse are given discrete attention. This can mirror an affective overload as well where the presence of an abundance of images that a reader might react to adds to an experience of overwhelming emotion.
Consider the third strip of the sequence. The subdivision of the action depicted here makes each discrete movement far more apparent. In considering these motions in the context of an orienter panel which provides an overview of the whole diegetic space (i.e. the space of the imagined world of the comic)68, and
the second strip which provides information about the direction of the blast, we can see, looking closely, that as the boy runs towards the viewer, away from the blast center, the man actually moves back slightly, toward the blast, very actively shielding the boy with his own body. This, paired with a heightened awareness of the space, makes it apparent that the huddled bodies in front of the monster in the final splash panel are the bodies of the boy and man.
The semiotic overload in these panels, the heightened attention to every detail, is paralleled, in my reading of the comic, with an overload of sadness and horror, as the proliferation of details, these instances of nonaction, build to a
68 Pascal Lefevre, “The Construction of Space in Comics,” in A Comics Studies Reader,